Machine Learning seeks to identify and encode bodies of knowledge within provided datasets. However, data encodes subjective content, which determines the possible outcomes of the models trained on it. Because such subjectivity enables marginalisation of parts of society, it is termed (social) `bias' and sought to be removed. In this paper, we contextualise this discourse of bias in the ML community against the subjective choices in the development process. Through a consideration of how choices in data and model development construct subjectivity, or biases that are represented in a model, we argue that addressing and mitigating biases is near-impossible. This is because both data and ML models are objects for which meaning is made in each step of the development pipeline, from data selection over annotation to model training and analysis. Accordingly, we find the prevalent discourse of bias limiting in its ability to address social marginalisation. We recommend to be conscientious of this, and to accept that de-biasing methods only correct for a fraction of biases.

Thus, social media platforms are often held responsible for framing the views and opinions of a large number of people (Duggan et al., 2017). However, this freedom to voice our opinion has been challenged by the increase in the use of hate speech (Mondal et al., 2017). The anonymity of the internet grants people the power to completely change the context of a discussion and suppress a person's personal opinion (Sticca and Perren, 2013). These hateful posts and comments not only affect the society at a micro scale but also at a global level by influencing people's views regarding important global events like elections, and protests (Duggan et al., 2017). Given the volume of online communication happening on various social media platforms and the need for more fruitful communication, there is a growing need to automate the detection of hate speech. For the scope of this paper we adopt the definition of hate speech and offensive speech as defined in the Mandl et al. (2019) as "insulting, hurtful, derogatory, or obscene content directed from one person to another person" (quoted from (Mandl et al., 2019)). In order to automate hate speech detection the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has made significant progress which has been accelerated by organization of numerous shared tasks aimed at identifying hate speech (Mandl et al., 2019; Kumar et al., 2020, 2018).

It will be useful to setting up a general, abstract framework in which to discuss these issues. Generally speaking AI systems, and for that matter computer programs of any kind for a particular task, the actual ultimate objective can be formulated as follows. There is a class X of inputs that are "reasonable" problems for Q. There is a class Y of possible outputs. The task defines a relation Q(x, y) meaning "y is a good output [or an acceptable output, or the best possible output] on the task for input x." We assume that for every x X there is at least one y Y such that Q(x, y).

Autoregressive sequence Generation models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in areas like machine translation and image captioning. These models are autoregressive in that they generate each word by conditioning on previously generated words, which leads to heavy latency during inference. Recently, non-autoregressive decoding has been proposed in machine translation to speed up the inference time by generating all words in parallel. Typically, these models use the word-level cross-entropy loss to optimize each word independently. However, such a learning process fails to consider the sentence-level consistency, thus resulting in inferior generation quality of these non-autoregressive models. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient model for Non-Autoregressive sequence Generation (NAG) with a novel training paradigm: Counterfactuals-critical Multi-Agent Learning (CMAL). CMAL formulates NAG as a multi-agent reinforcement learning system where element positions in the target sequence are viewed as agents that learn to cooperatively maximize a sentence-level reward. On MSCOCO image captioning benchmark, our NAG method achieves a performance comparable to state-of-the-art autoregressive models, while brings 13.9x decoding speedup. On WMT14 EN-DE machine translation dataset, our method outperforms cross-entropy trained baseline by 6.0 BLEU points while achieves the greatest decoding speedup of 17.46x.

With an increase in Geospatial Linked Open Data being adopted and published over the web, there is a need to develop intuitive interfaces and systems for seamless and efficient exploratory analysis of such rich heterogeneous multi-modal datasets. This work is geared towards improving the exploration process of Earth Observation (EO) Linked Data by developing a natural language interface to facilitate querying. Questions asked over Earth Observation Linked Data have an inherent spatio-temporal dimension and can be represented using GeoSPARQL. This paper seeks to study and analyze the use of RNN-based neural machine translation with attention for transforming natural language questions into GeoSPARQL queries. Specifically, it aims to assess the feasibility of a neural approach for identifying and mapping spatial predicates in natural language to GeoSPARQL's topology vocabulary extension including - Egenhofer and RCC8 relations. The queries can then be executed over a triple store to yield answers for the natural language questions. A dataset consisting of mappings from natural language questions to GeoSPARQL queries over the Corine Land Cover(CLC) Linked Data has been created to train and validate the deep neural network. From our experiments, it is evident that neural machine translation with attention is a promising approach for the task of translating spatial predicates in natural language questions to GeoSPARQL queries.

The non-autoregressive models have boosted the efficiency of neural machine translation through parallelized decoding at the cost of effectiveness when comparing with the autoregressive counterparts. In this paper, we claim that the syntactic and semantic structures among natural language are critical for non-autoregressive machine translation and can further improve the performance. However, these structures are rarely considered in the existing non-autoregressive models. Inspired by this intuition, we propose to incorporate the explicit syntactic and semantic structures of languages into a non-autoregressive Transformer, for the task of neural machine translation. Moreover, we also consider the intermediate latent alignment within target sentences to better learn the long-term token dependencies. Experimental results on two real-world datasets (i.e., WMT14 En-De and WMT16 En-Ro) show that our model achieves a significantly faster speed, as well as keeps the translation quality when compared with several state-of-the-art non-autoregressive models.

In this paper, we consider the problem of leveraging textual descriptions to improve generalization of control policies to new scenarios. Unlike prior work in this space, we do not assume access to any form of prior knowledge connecting text and state observations, and learn both symbol grounding and control policy simultaneously. This is challenging due to a lack of concrete supervision, and incorrect groundings can result in worse performance than policies that do not use the text at all. We develop a new model, EMMA (Entity Mapper with Multi-modal Attention) which uses a multi-modal entity-conditioned attention module that allows for selective focus over relevant sentences in the manual for each entity in the environment. EMMA is end-to-end differentiable and can learn a latent grounding of entities and dynamics from text to observations using environment rewards as the only source of supervision. To empirically test our model, we design a new framework of 1320 games and collect text manuals with free-form natural language via crowd-sourcing. We demonstrate that EMMA achieves successful zero-shot generalization to unseen games with new dynamics, obtaining significantly higher rewards compared to multiple baselines. The grounding acquired by EMMA is also robust to noisy descriptions and linguistic variation.

Leaderboards have eased model development for many NLP datasets by standardizing their evaluation and delegating it to an independent external repository. Their adoption, however, is so far limited to tasks that can be reliably evaluated in an automatic manner. This work introduces GENIE, an extensible human evaluation leaderboard, which brings the ease of leaderboards to text generation tasks. GENIE automatically posts leaderboard submissions to crowdsourcing platforms asking human annotators to evaluate them on various axes (e.g., correctness, conciseness, fluency) and compares their answers to various automatic metrics. We introduce several datasets in English to GENIE, representing four core challenges in text generation: machine translation, summarization, commonsense reasoning, and machine comprehension. We provide formal granular evaluation metrics and identify areas for future research. We make GENIE publicly available and hope that it will spur progress in language generation models as well as their automatic and manual evaluation.

The basic idea behind such a model though, is only the encoder-decoder architecture. These networks are usually used for a variety of tasks like text-summerization, Machine translation, Image Captioning, etc.

Understanding human language is one of the key themes of artificial intelligence. For language representation, the capacity of effectively modeling the linguistic knowledge from the detail-riddled and lengthy texts and getting rid of the noises is essential to improve its performance. Traditional attentive models attend to all words without explicit constraint, which results in inaccurate concentration on some dispensable words. In this work, we propose using syntax to guide the text modeling by incorporating explicit syntactic constraints into attention mechanisms for better linguistically motivated word representations. In detail, for self-attention network (SAN) sponsored Transformer-based encoder, we introduce syntactic dependency of interest (SDOI) design into the SAN to form an SDOI-SAN with syntax-guided self-attention. Syntax-guided network (SG-Net) is then composed of this extra SDOI-SAN and the SAN from the original Transformer encoder through a dual contextual architecture for better linguistics inspired representation. The proposed SG-Net is applied to typical Transformer encoders. Extensive experiments on popular benchmark tasks, including machine reading comprehension, natural language inference, and neural machine translation show the effectiveness of the proposed SG-Net design.